My Sandman Samples

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Shade the changing man test page.

Delirium

Hellblazer

Back when I first decided to submit my work to the big publishers, I sent in some of my art from Nature of the Beast, and a few other bits.

Most of my packages went to DC, including one to Karen Burger’s office. This is before Vertigo was formed, but her roll as the editor of all my favorite tittles well established!

I was contacted by her assistant and asked if i’d like to do some test pages. They even paid, half the standard rate! Something i’m told is no longer often done. Pretty sweet and I loved Sandman so was hyped about this!

This scene came from a story written for Jill Thompson to draw, and I recall being blown away with how well Neil wrote. It was a pleasure to do these from his script. I also am happy the issue had not come out yet so I had to come up with my own stuff, and then later was able to look at what Jill did after the fact. The thing that really jumped out at me was how similar our panels were. I chalk it up to Neil’s script, it was so very clear and enjoyable to read and perfectly painted the frames in my head. It made the work effortless. Very rare i’ve found, working with other authors scripts over the years since.

They like these at the office, but had some issues with my cross hatching and they wanted to see more story telling, so they sent me some more samples to do on Shade the changing man.

I was in the midst of doing those – the only one that got totally inked follows the sand man pages here – when Marvel called and hired me to do 19 pages at full rate for Night Breed. Kind of wish sometimes i’d made time to finish that second test and gotten in at Vertigo early on after all. The last two images here are sketches I did between 1993 and 1995 of DC characters i’d have liked to have drawn.